The blades are out: 5,670 so far

Published 10:45 am, Saturday, August 22, 2015

The absentee ballot is the knife in the street-fighting that will precede the Sept. 16 Democratic mayoral primary in Bridgeport.

And that door-to-door, hand-to-hand combat is well underway: as of Friday afternoon, campaign operatives and maybe even some regular people had taken more than 5,670 applications for absentee ballots from the Bridgeport Town Clerk’s office.

The ballots themselves won’t be ready until Aug. 25, but when they are ... well, start your engines, ladies and gentlemen.

If Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch had the presence of mind to have state-appointed observers at last month’s Democratic Town Committee mayor endorsement session, guaranteed he’ll have some precautions in place for the circus that will unfold on Sept. 16.

Many years ago, I made an unauthorized entrance into a city-run nursing home, where, a prior perusal of various voter registration documents and absentee ballot applications showed that a startling number of elderly people had developed a sudden interest in Bridgeport politics. Some, in their 80s and 90s, had registered as voters for the fiirst time in Bridgeport, and had voted in that year’s Democratic primary.

Not that all of them knew they had voted.

One elderly woman — a life-long Republican, she snapped, when I asked of her interest in the Democratic primary — said she had done no such thing as vote in a Democratic primary. But wait, she said, she had filled out some papers given to her by the hospital administrator, a Democratic patronage appointment and zealot.

They had something to do with insurance, she said.

Insurance, indeed — just not the type she’d imagined.

Sure there will be matters of philosophy and ideology— not to mention countless old scores to settle — when Finch squares off with felonious former Mayor Joseph P. Ganim, former ally Mary-Jane Foster, school board member Howard Gardner and perennial Charlie Coviello, but it will be in the trenches, in the streets and gin mills, and neighborhood clubs and churches, where a critical part of the fight will occur.

Someone must be expecting an outbreak of whooping cough or something worse, because 5,670 absentee ballots would account for the unavailability of more than 14 percent of the city’s 39,465 registered Democratic voters. Whooping cough, I mention, only because to legally use an absentee ballot, you have to be unable to get to a poll because you are sick, are on active duty with the military, intend to be out of town that day, have a religious conflict, a physical disability or are working all through election hours at a poll other than their own.

Another election night memory: Polls have closed and the sporting guys are filing in to Democratic headquarters in downtown Bridgeport, waiting for returns. It is, of course, going to be another major thumping of some Republican. Spirits are high and when — I’ll call him Tony — Tony flashes open his sport coat exposing a half dozen cute little “I Voted Today” stickers to the glare of the fluorescent light, there is much guffawing. Tony has been a busy boy, voting under various names at Bridgeport polls.

It is not a fiction that dead people vote in Bridgeport. And guys like Tony, with the six “I Voted Today” trophies, know where they are and how to, shall we say, resurrect them for one more Election Day.

There are tens of thousands of names on the Democratic voting list, a list meticulously maintained and monitored and studied by Bridgeport’s Democratic Registrar of Voters, Santa Ayala, the subject of what unquestionably must be one of the most thorough investigations ever undertaken by the chief state’s attorney.

So one of the morals of the tale is this: As it stands today — actually as of Aug. 17, according to the Bridgeport Registrars of Voters office — 39,465 voters registered as Democrats are eligible to vote in the Sept. 16 Democratic primary.

To get another idea of the importance of this primary — generally any Democratic primary — consider that there are but 3,535 registered Republicans in town.

For them, it is too late to do anything about the upcoming Democratic primary except watch.

But for the city’s 15,429 unaffiliated voters, they still have time to get in on the action. Until noon on Sept. 15, an unaffiliated voter can register as a Democrat, according to the registrars’ office. So why let a handful of party regulars determine who the next mayor is going to be.